No, no - surely not! My God - not more of
those damned whores! Never have I known worse women!

Lt Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, on sighting
the Lady Juliana of the Second Fleet coming into Sydney Harbour with over two
hundred female convicts aboard, June 1790.

Though how many (of the female convicts) were
prostitutes will never be known, almost all contemporaries regarded them as
particularly "abandoned"; and even if these contemporaries exaggerated, the
picture they presented is a singularly unattractive one!

A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, 1966

The social and economic conditions of the first fifty
years of white colonisation of Australia fostered whores rather than wives. The
traditional Jedaeo-Christian notion that all women could be categorised as being
exclusively either good or evil - with the virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene being
in prototypes of each kind - was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. but
its application to the women in this country was totally lopsided. From 1788
until the 1840s almost all women were categorised as whores - or "damned whores"
- as Lt Ralph Clark called them. this categorisation was initially based on the
fact that virtually all of the white women to come here in the first two decades
of colonisation were transported convicts, but it was continually reinforced by
the social structure which evolved in the penal colony. thus even female
convicts who had served their sentences had little chance of having their status
redefined and the stereotype came to be applied to many other women in the
colony who had not been transported.

Aboriginal Bora Ceremony -
Arrival of the King c1905

The First Fleet consisted of 1480
people more than half of whom were convicts. There were 586 male and 192 female
convicts as well as a large number seamen, marines, servants and officials. Only
a tiny fraction of these were accompanied by their wives and children. governor
Arthur Phillip hoped he was to be the first superintendent of a new outpost of
British civilisation. He wanted free settlers to be encouraged to migrate
and he wrote, "As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire,
I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison and other settlers
that may come from Europe."

The British Home Office had other ideas, however,
and intended New South Wales to be little more than a dumping ground for the
excess of convicts which British gaols could not accommodate. Within this penal
colony, women were assigned only one main function - they were there primarily
as objects of sexual gratification. the main difficulty, as far as the British
authorities were concerned, was to find a sufficient number of women convicts,
and to do this they had to impose peponderantly harsher sentences on women:
"Whereas only the more hardened male offenders under sentence of transportation
were actually transported to the Colonies, all women under sentence, provided
they were healthy and under forty-five were transported".

Even this measure could not secure enough women and
Governor Phillip's instruction included the following order:

And whereas, as from the great disproportion of female convicts to
those of the males who are put under your superintendance, it appears
advisable that a further number of the latter should be introduced into
the new intended settlement, you are, whenever the Sirius or the
tender shall touch at any of the islands in those seas, to instruct their
commanders to take aboard any of the women who may be disposed to
accompany them to the said settlement.

Aboriginal man

Phillipdeclined to
obey this instruction but he did not disagree with its underlying assumption
about women's role in the penal settlement. Four months after landing at Port
Jackson he wrote to Lord Sydney in England: "The very small proportion of
females makes the sending of an additional number absolutely necessary, for I am
certain your Lordship will think that to send women from the Islands, in our
present situation, would answer no purpose than that of bringing them to pine
away in misery".

The sexual abuse of female convicts began on the ships.
Although after 1811 the women travelled on separate ships from the male
convicts, they had the crews to contend with. W.H.R. Brown told the Select
Committee on the State of Gaols in 1819 that:

These women informed me, as well as others of their shipmates, that
they were subject to every insult from the mast of the ship and sailors;
that the master stript several of them and publickly whipped them; that
one young women, from ill treatment, threw herself into the sea and
perished, that the master beat one of the women that lived with me with a
rope with his own hands till she was much bruised in her arms,
breasts, and other parts of her body. I am certain, from her general good
conduct, she could not have merited any cruelty from him.

He also reported that "the youngest and handsomest of
the women were selected from the other convicts and sent on board, by order of
the master, the king's ships...for the vilest purposes..." One convict women,
Elisabeth Barber, accused Thomas Arndell, the assistant surgeon of the ship on
which she was transported of being "a poxy blood-letter who seduced innocent
girls while treating them for the fever, using his surgery as a floating
whore-house". Some convict women did not even reach their expected destination.
In 1797 the military guard and several of the sailors aboard the female
transport Lady Shore seized control of the ship and sailed it to
Montevideo. there the mutineers were made prisoners of war and the 65 convict
women were distributed as servants to Spanish ladies of the port. After this
incident guards were no longer placed on ships carrying female convicts, but the
transportees could do little to escape the advances of the surgeons or sailors.

When the First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson, the
female convicts were kept aboard for five days while the other ships were
unloaded and elementary shelters were constructed. governor Phillip turned a
blind eye to the riotous two-day debauch which ensued when the women landed.
This Bacchanalia, and Phillip's response, signalled the kind of treatment which
was to be the lot of the female convicts. One settler wrote to England:

It will perhaps scarcely be believed that, on
the arrival of a female convict ship. the custom has been to suffer the
inhabitants of the colony each to select one at his pleasure, not only as
servants but as avowed objects of intercourse, which is without even the plea of
the slightest previous attachment as an excuse, rendering he whole colony little
better than an extensive brothel...

The 1812 Select Committee on Transportation reported
that female convicts "were indiscriminately given to such of the inhabitants as
demanded them, and were in general received rather as prostitutes than as
servants". The women were distributed to the men almost as part of the daily
rations. In 1803 forty women were listed, baldly, as "women allowed to the New
South Wales Corps'. In a penal settlement where there were at first no gaols -
since the entire island continent was regarded as a prison - and which was both
physically and morally remote from England, the usual sexual division of labour
assumed a particularly brutal and oppressive form. The men were set to work at
constructing the basic requirements of a new settlement - building, roads,
fences - or to farming or manufacturing. they were forced to work hard, on
near-starvation rations in the first few years, and were brutally punished for
even minor transgressions. there was little employment for the women. Since
there were so few free settlers the demand for servant was minimal and light
manufacturing or other industries which could have absorbed them developed
rather slowly.

The women's punishment comprised transportation plus
enforced whoredom. For at least the first twenty years they had no means of
escaping this fate. the best a woman could do was to form an attachment with one
man and live with him as his wife and in this way protect herself from the
unwelcome attentions of any other man who fancied her. but whether she was
concubine to one man or available to all she was still considered a whore.
"Since there was virtually no escape from the colony which required women to be
whores, there was no escaping whoredom. Even those convict women who formed
attachments with governors or other prominent men, and bore them children, were
unable to shake off the common status and assume anything matching the social
standing of either these men or the wives and daughters of men of similar rank.
The list of time-expired male convicts who were able to cast aside their past
and acquire wealth and respectability is long and impressive. Very few women
could match their success. Mary Reiby, who inherited her husband's
merchant business and expanded it successfully, is conspicuous because she was
unique.

Marriage did not automatically ensure that women could
flee from the whore stereotype. the taint borne by the female convicts seems to
have been more permanent than it was for men. In any case, not many female
convicts had the opportunity to marry, especially in the first three decades.
Although the British authorities had made a perfunctory recommendation to
governor Phillip that he encourage "the promotion of matrimonial connexion
between the unmarried people - a measure which must tend to the improvement of
their morals" in practice women were transported solely to serve as sexual
commodities and the British Government acted as Imperial whoremaster. Its
attitude was one of sheer hypocrisy. Although Phillip, who wanted to govern a
new society not just a penal settlement, did encourage marriage, there was
little incentive, and several obstacles, to these first settlers marrying. soon
after landing in 1788 Phillip had approved the marriage of thirty couples but
many of these marriages were contracted in the expectation that married people
would receive comforts and privileges denied to single people. when these hopes
proved false many asked to be released from their contract and after 24 February
1788 the percentage of marriages per population was greatly reduced.
time-expired convicts and other free settlers received grants of land in
Phillip's time, and married men received larger grants if they had a wife, as
well as getting an additional ten acres for each child. but this was a limited
inducement. the majority of convicts had come from cities and had little
intr4est in land cultivation. Many admitt4d signing over their land holdings -
at no charge - because they had no use for them. Neither was marriage encouraged
by the legal position prior to 1834 whereby a marriage was invalid unless an
Anglican clergyman officiated an where a licence from the Governor was
necessary. roman Catholics, Presbyterians and other non-Anglicans were thus
prevented from being married within their religion because of the first
provision while the high costs of the licence deterred others.

Aboriginal dance

During his governorship from 1809 to 1820, Lachlan
Macquarie made some attempt to alter the situation of female convicts. Viscount
Castlereagh wrote to Macquarie:

It has been represented to me that upon the arrival of female convicts
in New South Wales, the unfortunate females have been given into the
possession of such of the inhabitants free settlers and convicts,
indiscriminately, as made a demand for them from the Governor. If a
practice so extraordinary and disgraceful has not been abolished, you will
by no means suffer it to continue, and I am to desire you will take the
proper means for having the female convicts, upon their arrival, kept
separate until they can be properly distributed in such a manner as may
encourage industry and character.

But neither pompous-sounding instructions from across
the ocean, nor Macquarie's efforts, could substantially alter what was by then a
deeply entrenched attitude. The men of the colony were accustomed to having
convict women at their disposal, even if there were at least three men to every
woman, and it was impossible to prevent servants being regarded as prostitutes
both by their employers and any other men on the place. Single men were
supposedly not able to have female convicts assigned to them, but in 1837 James
Mudie, a colonist, reported to the Select Committee on Transportation that "they
generally manage to get them".

The major obstacle to reform was the strength of the
Damned Whore stereotype. the ideology had become so powerful that it was
confused with reality. Even if large numbers of women did not conform to the
attributed of the stereotype, their behaviour was overlooked and the ideology
that all convict women were whores remained unchallenged. Female convicts were
universally condemned. Thomas McQueen, a magistrate and a former convict
himself, described the women he sentenced as "the most disgusting objects that
ever disgraced the female form". governor Darling wrote in 1830 - a decade after
Macquarie's term of reform had ended - that "the women sent out to this country
are of the very worst description, not in general being transported until there
is no longer any hope of their reformation at home". James Mudie thought that
they were "the lowest possible...they all smoke, drink and in fact, to speak in
plain language, I consider them all prostitutes". Even Macquarie was
condemnatory and he wrote to Earl Bathurst in 1813 that the female convicts were
"so very depraved that they are frequently concerned in the most dreadful acts
of atrocity". although he wanted more male convicts to be sent out since the
prosperity of the Colony depended on labour being available for public works and
agriculture, he considered that "female convicts are as great a drawback as
others are beneficial".

None of these men tempered their vilifications with any
recognition of the lack of choice open to women. they had been transported to
service the sexual needs of the males of the Colony and were then condemned for
their behaviour. This has always been the fate of prostitutes in a patriarchal
and sexist society: the women are chastised while their male patrons, without
whom prostitution would not exist, escape criticism or punishment. governor
Macquarie indicated that he was unwilling to perpetuate the enforced whoredom
when he requested that no more women be transported. this pleas was ignored and
women continued to be sent out. but neither did Macquarie show much sympathy for
women. It could have been expected that, in his zealou7s attempts to transform
the penal colony into a civilised society, he would have applauded female
convicts marrying and leaving the colony. but he reported to Castlereagh in 1810
that he had been "induced to grant more free pardons than I could have wished;
in order to enable a number of women, who had lived for many years with and had
children by soldiers of the 102nd regiment, to marry those men, and accompany
them home". although he regretted having to take this course of action, he was
comforted by the thought that it had at least saved the government the expense
of victualling the women and their progeny, and since economy was being demanded
of him by England he could be assured that his actions would be approved.

Like the contemporary observers, historians of the
convict period have condemned the female convicts. A.G.L. Shaw was quoted at the
beginning of this Web site: he evidently found the picture too horrifying even
to allow further investigations. L.L. Robson, the other main authority on
transportation, is less reserved and reinforces the contemporary judgments by
reinvoking them in modern terms of moral abuse. He finds evidence of
"indiscriminate love-making" by some of the women, and notes that "some female
prisoners, particularly those from the cities of Britain, were accustomed to
loose living". A tone of disapproval pervades his descriptions of the convict
women: he clearly agrees with the Damned Whore stereotype. That many of the
women were whores is beyond dispute. What historians have failed to appreciate
is the extent to which the women had any choice about this. Nor have they
distinguished the extent of the reputation from the extent of the crime.